Sunday, January 17, 2016

While open access was not conceivable
until the emergence of the Internet (and thus could be viewed as just a natural
development of the network) the “OA movement” primarily grew out of a conviction
that scholarly publishers have been exploiting the research community, not
least by constantly increasing journal subscriptions. It was for this reason
that the movement was initially driven by librarians.

OA advocates reasoned that while the
research community freely contributes the content in scholarly journals, and
freely peer reviews that content, publishers then sell it back to research
institutions at ever more extortionate prices, at levels in fact that have made
it increasingly difficult for research institutions to provide faculty members with
access to all the research they need to do their jobs.

What was required, it was concluded,
was for subscription paywalls to be dismantled so that anyone can access all the
research they need — i.e. open access. In the process, argued OA advocates, the
ability of publishers to overcharge would be removed, and the cost of scholarly
publishing would come down accordingly.

But while the movement has persuaded
many governments, funders and research institutions that open access is both inevitable
and optimal, and should therefore increasingly be made compulsory, publishers have
shown themselves to be extremely adept at appropriating OA for their own ends,
not least by simply swapping subscription fees for article-processing charges
(APCs) without realising any savings for the research community.

This is all too evident in Europe
right now. In the UK, for
instance, government policy is enabling legacy publishers to migrate to an open
access environment with their high profits intact. Indeed, not only are costs
not coming down but — as subscription publishers introduce hybrid OA options that
enable them to earn both APCs and subscriptions from the same journals (i.e. to
“double-dip”) — they are
increasing.

Meanwhile, in The Netherlands
universities are signing new-style Big Deals that
combine both subscription and OA fees. While these are intended to manage the
transition to OA in a cost-efficient way, publishers are clearly ensuring that
they experience no loss of revenue as a result (although we cannot state that
as a fact since the contracts are subject to non-disclosure clauses).

More recently, the German funder Max Planck has begun a campaign intended to
engineer a mass “flipping” of legacy journals to OA business models. Again, we
can be confident that publishers will not co-operate with any such plan unless they
are able to retain their current profit levels.

It is no surprise, therefore, that many
OA advocates have become concerned that the OA project has gone awry.